Clicker®

Claire Adshead
Heybrook Primary School Oldham

I went on a Clicker course about 12 months ago and have been using it ever since with all the children that I work with!  As a teaching assistant providing support for children with special needs, I think Clicker is just a fantastic tool for enabling them to be able to still work with the national curriculum but in a fun and easy-to-understand way! 

"...without a full stop, it won't read back to them!"I work with children aged between 5 and 7 who need additional support, either as they have special needs or as new arrivals with very little English.  Clicker is great for sentence building and the children learn about punctuation – without a full stop, it won’t read back to them!  The speech feedback is also a great feature providing additional support and reinforcement. 

I take small groups of children into the computer suite to help build on their literacy skills.  The great thing about Clicker is that we can use it for all the children, whether they have special needs, are new arrivals, are struggling with their writing, right up to those gifted and talented children who need to be stretched. 

"...it's so adaptable!"Clicker is also brilliant as you don’t just have to use it to support literacy and numeracy – it can be used to support science, ICT, history and geography, it’s so adaptable!  And it’s not a problem for Teachers/Teaching Assistants who are new to the software, if you don’t know how to create your own grids, Crick have the LearningGrids website which already has lots of grids ready to use!

I have used lots of the free resources you can download from the LearningGrids website.  With the children with EAL, I have used lots of the basic grids with simple numeracy/literacy games to help them with their vocabulary.  Being able to load the grids directly from the website into Clicker 5 makes it very easy for me to make use of the grids straight away.

I also find it very useful that I can create my own grids so I can make one according to the lesson/ability/age of the children. I have also used Clicker as an example of supporting children in my college assignment. It’s such as great tool that I am always telling people about it!

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